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How can we make sense of tensions and contradictions in digitally mediated practices of anonymity and identification? This article calls for foregrounding computer protocols as key sites for locating how agency amongst increasingly complex sets of relations between human and non-human actors is impacting contemporary (in)security. We distinguish agency within and between contemporary finance/security infrastructures by tracing the development, application and updating of a particular set of computer protocols – blockchains. Locating agency at the site of these and other computer protocols, we argue, exposes security politics that have largely remained overlooked in the ongoing engagement of critical security studies with science and technology studies. Widening engagements with security devices, this article also broadens the interdisciplinary engagements of critical security studies with new media and software studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do international organisations (IOs) govern the present based on claims about the coming impacts of technological change? Drawing on primary documents and participant observation, this article traces how the Organisation of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) anticipates automation emanating from the growing integration of blockchain technologies in global governance. We find that promises of radical, rapid, and reckless automation advanced by promoters of Bitcoin and other 'defiant' applications of the technology are steered by this IO towards more incremental and carefully managed forms of automation. The OECD relies on two managerialist practices to anticipate "reckless automation" through the promotion of what we identify as "responsible disruption". In combination, OECD practices of scenario building and shared orientation framework construction deepen and extend managerial forms of global governance today whose technocratic and expert-led nature limits democratic possibilities and perpetuates global inequalities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]